EASA 2018: 30 workshops, 500 students, 2 weeks, one community

EASA (European Architecture Students Assembly) is a platform for cultural and educational exchange, connecting architecture students and professionals from all of the European countries. It was born back in 1981 in Liverpool as a one-time gathering for students who wanted to rethink the architecture education through a direct engagement in a certain place. Having the city as a provocation, they organized workshops to practice architecture. EASA has since grown into a network and a community, with the summer assembly being its core manifestation.

Date: 21st of July till 4th of August

Place: In the city of Rijeka, Croatia

published 05.07.2018

The assembly spreads over two weeks in the summer, often considered by the attendees as the most intensive two weeks experienced by far. During these 14 days, the multitude of EASAians form a “utopian” community which maintains itself – nearly 600 students and professionals study, work, rest, cook, eat, clean, live and, most importantly act together.

The event focuses mostly on the workshops – taking up the majority of time. The main workshop program is essentially followed by lectures, conducted by professionals from divergent spheres of activity. Exhibitions, open discussions, intuitive one-day workshops and spontaneous performances, further investigate the questions arising during these two weeks.

EASA gives a chance to experience architecture in a way that the universities are yet unable to provide – it brings students to a certain context, defined by the location and the theme of the assembly, where they raise questions themselves and investigate them through the eyes of all the European cultures simultaneously. Being their own educators, students then elaborate the answers and bring them to reality.

EASA does not exist as a legitimate international body and has no chairman or any type of directors. Its continuity depends on the ever-present urge for a supplement to the conventional architectural education and for exploration of methods of architectural engagement. Its coherence and consistence depend solely on trust.

RE:EASA: EASA 2018 will take place from 21st of July till 4th of August in the city of Rijeka, Croatia. EASA Croatia, a group of young architects, architecture and graphic design students, won in the EASA bidding competition in Madrid in October of 2016, and earned the chance to hosts this year’s, 38th EASA assembly, under the name of ‘’RE:EASA’’.

Thematical framework: A decade into the post-2008-crisis shock, still highly sensitive yet with a colder head, RE:EASA: is recapping the knowledge and understandings resulting from the crisis, paving ways for new roles, goals and identities. Deriving from such a multi-layered state of affairs, the real challenge is to properly formulate questions and to grow a collective mindset based on universal and contemporary understandings of “socially, economically and environmentally sensitive design”. RE:EASA: proposes the concept of “RE” as a prism through which all actions will be re-thought and re-evaluated.

‘RE:’ means acknowledging the existed or existing and taking upon it. ‘RE:’ is dealing with the past or the present to sort things out for the future. ‘RE:’ is aware of the circular nature of reality and the interconnection of things. ‘RE:’ establishes a new and different kind of order or value. ‘RE:’ opposes to ignorance. RE:EASA: aims to challenge architecture to reembrace its social role, to redraw the borders of the discipline, to stop running from the continuities, to embrace “the existing” rather than to ignore it.

RE:EASA: is taking the city of Rijeka as object to exercise on. “RE” should be a vehicle for an interdisciplinary process, considering the city in need of a transformation with all its layers of history, its conditions, built environment, properties and problems. Architecture should, by following the multidisciplinary “RE” concept, make a positive impact and contribution to the human community by combining tools and knowledge on many scales, both personal and collective. Could architects aid the cities and society to reincarnate into better versions of themselves?

ARCHITECTURE & DESIGN

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